Behavioural Science Day for Government: Beyond the Nudge​

Singapore's public service was an early adopter of behavioural science, working with the UK's Behavioural Insights Team (the storied "Nudge Unit") since 2012, with BIT opening a permanent Singapore office in 2016. A decade on, behavioural insights have moved well beyond the small-scale "nudge": redesigned letters, reminder texts and default options. Agencies now use behavioural science to test employment and health interventions at national scale, and to shape the systems and processes through which government works.​

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Getting a citizen to renew their road tax or pay a fine on time is a solved problem for many agencies. Getting an organisation to adopt a test-and-learn mindset, to normalise experimentation over habit, and to genuinely change internal culture as officers grapple with new AI-blended ways of working, is a different order of challenge. Public officers are now expected to be evidence-based policymakers, culture-change agents, and AI adopters all at once, often without a shared playbook for how these threads connect.​
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This half-day event brings together public officers, agency leaders, and BIT's practitioners to explore how behaviour change  principles that have shaped national policy can be turned inward and upstream. Drawing on lessons from both government and corporate transformations globally, case studies and discussions with public sector leaders will take behavioural science beyond a toolkit for individual choices, casting this approach as a lens for understanding and redesigning systems.​

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The event will convene public officers across ministries and statutory boards, with keynotes from BIT's leadership and case-study driven panels to help agencies translate behavioural science from a policy tool into an upstream lens capable of systematic shifts that improve the view of any public or private issue.​

 

Key Takeaways:

 

• Understand what a decade of evidence-based policymaking has taught Singapore - including how "test, learn, grow" methodologies like RCTs and rapid trials have shifted from pilot projects to standard practice in some agencies, and what conditions made that possible.​

• Learn how to apply behavioural science inward, not just outward - practical approaches for using behavioural insights as a lens for internal process change, culture change and AI adoption within your own organisation, not only in citizen-facing policy.​

• Gain insight into where systems-level and cross-organisational change is headed - moving from isolated behavioural interventions to shaping entire systems, taking reference from both national-level culture shifts and organisational transformations elsewhere.​

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